‘Logan’ director James Mangold talks about ‘the Westchester incident’

This article includes spoilers.

In case you missed the news, Hugh Jackman’s final Wolverine film in “Logan” is a certified hit, generating nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in its first week at the global box office and getting fans talking about how great and visceral it is. That’s thanks in no small part to Jackman’s portrayal, as well as the spectacular supporting performance of Patrick Stewart, who reprises his role as Charles Xavier whom Logan now has to protect and care for.

How exactly these former heroes came to be mere shadows of their former selves is never outright shown in the film, but a brief news bulletin played in the radio during the middle part of the movie makes mention of the “the Westchester incident,” which has something to do with the fate of their mutant family, the X-Men.

In an interview with Coming Soon.net, director James Mangold revealed that he originally planned to open “Logan” with the “incident,” showing Professor X experiencing a pychic seizure that temporarily paralyzes hundreds of and killed seven, including the X-Men. He later decided against it, because it would have made the movie about the incident.

“It suddenly made the movie about X-Men dying, as opposed to allowing the movie to be a kind of unwinding onion, like allowing you to kind of enter the story and go, ‘Where is this going?’ It was so large and loomed so large, and I felt like it also was still falling into the formula of the movies, with the big opener, that is setting up the mythology first. I thought, “What if we do an opener that leans into character first? Actually underplay those things?” Let them just feel like it’s more like a—what’s that?”

Those who haven’t seen “Logan” yet can consider this a slight spoiler for the film, but this part was partially hinted in trailers and interviews.

The film is loosely inspired by the Mark Millar and Steve McNiven comic book story “Old Man Logan,” in which Wolverine unwittingly kills the rest of the X-Men due to the actions of the Spider-Man villain Mysterio. He goes into exile and ends up a broken shell of a man before rising back to fight the Hulk and his family many years later. — BM, GMA News

“Logan” is now showing in theaters.